Yellowstone

Category archives for Yellowstone

Lets get right to it! “Manmade volcanoes”: can they solve global warming? It does indeed seem that something is happening beneath Kanlaon in the Philippines. PHIVOLCS reports that the volcano experienced 257 volcanic earthquakes from August 23 to September 1, well above the usually “background” level of ~20-30 a week. Most of this seismicity is…

Hydrothermal fields are tricky beasts. They can wax and wane as the magmatic system heats and cools, as the water table rises and falls and as other events such as earthquakes or explosions might change the conduit systems. Changes are relatively common, as we’ve seen in recent events in the Yellowstone Basin and with the…

You’ll have to excuse the curtness of this post. An bad hop in softball will do that to you. Here’s some news: Mt. Dempo in Indonesia Xinhua offers some nice pictures of the current activity going on at the summit crater at Nyiragongo in the Congo. Note the partially-crusted-over lava lake in the first shot.…

This is another busy Wednesday for me as the Geology Dept. at UC Davis will be hosting Dr. Jacob Lowenstern, USGS scientist and director of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. He will be giving the weekly seminar, along with another talk in the evening at Sacramento State as part of the Volcanological Society of Sacramento meeting…

Busy day so I probably won’t get to update much as we’re busy hosting Dr. Charlie Bacon, geologist for the USGS, here at UC Davis today. Dr. Bacon has written some seminal papers in his career and is probably the foremost authority of the evolution of Crater Lake/Mt. Mazama (speaking of which, >a new geologic…

Yellowstone Lake eruption, April 1, 2009 Well, after all the seismicity and uplift at Yellowstone caldera over the last few years, something finally happened. Early this morning, without much warning, an eruption occurred in Yellowstone Lake (see above) and sent steam and ash up 50,000 feet above the park. Luckily, no one was injured or…

Back in a former life, I was really into radio and music. Such an existence calls for many lists of rankings: “Best albums of 2004”, “All time greatest soul singers”, “Worst album covers of the 1980s”. And, although I love a list as much as the next person, I tend to find lists appalling. Why?…

I just wanted to point folks to an interview in US News & World Report with the USGS scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, Dr. Jacob Lowenstern. He plays down the swarm, noting that things like this happened in the 1980s and that Yellowstone has seen over 80 eruptions in the caldera since the last…

Yellowstone looks to be keeping everyone on their toes as we ring in 2009. The earthquake swarm reported earlier this week is continuing, with multiple events between 2-3.5 on the Richter Scale. Again, the folks monitoring the caldera – this time the Univ. of Utah – play down these events as normal for any active…

2008 is almost finished and we’ve seen one of the few high-silica rhyolite eruptions in the past 100 years at Chaiten in Chile. Chaiten was definitely not high on the list of potential locations for a rhyolite eruption worldwide. However, Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming definitely is high of the list because it has erupted a…